第43章

As I drove into the yard, a bare-headed old nigger with a game leg throwed down an armful of wood he was gathering and went limping up to the veranda as fast as he could.

He opened the door and bawled out, pointing to us, before he had it fairly open:

"O Marse WILLyum! O Miss LUCY! Dey've brung him home! DAR he!"A little, bright, black-eyed old lady like a wren comes running out of the house, and chirps:

"O Bud--O my honey boy! Is he dead?"

"I reckon not, Miss Lucy," says Bud raising himself up on the mattress as she runs up to the wagon, and trying to act like everything was all a joke. She was jest high enough to kiss him over the edge of the wagon box. A worried-looking old gentleman come out the door, seen Bud and his mother kissing each other, and then says to the old nigger man:

"George, yo' old fool, what do yo' mean by shouting out like that?""Marse Willyum--" begins George, explaining.

"Shut up," says the old gentleman, very quiet.

"Take the bay mare and go for Doctor Po'ter."Then he comes to the wagon and says:

"So they got yo', Bud? Yo' WOULD go night-riding like a rowdy and a thug! Are yo' much hurt?"He said it easy and gentle, more than mad.

But Bud, he flushed up, pale as he was, and didn't answer his dad direct. He turned to his mother and said:

"Miss Lucy, dear, it would 'a' done yo' heart good to see the way them trust warehouses blazed up!"And the old lady, smiling and crying both to oncet, says, "God bless her brave boy." But the old gentleman looked mighty serious, and his worry settled into a frown between his eyes, and he turns to me and says:

"Yo' must pardon us, sir, fo' neglecting to thank yo' sooner." I told him that would be all right, fur him not to worry none. And him and me and Mandy, which was the nigger cook, got Bud into the house and into his bed. And his mother gets that busy ordering Mandy and the old gentleman around, to get things and fix things, and make Bud as easy as she could, that you could see she was one of them kind of woman that gets a lot of satisfaction out of having some one sick to fuss over. And after quite a while George gets back with Doctor Porter.

He sets Bud's arm, and he locates the bullet in him, and he says he guesses he'll do in a few weeks if nothing like blood poisoning nor gangrene nor inflammation sets in.

Only the doctor says he "reckons" instead of he "guesses," which they all do down there. And they all had them easy-going, wait-a-bit kind of voices, and didn't see no pertic'ler importance in their "r's." It wasn't that you could spell it no different when they talked, but it sounded different.

I eat my breakfast with the old gentleman, and then I took a sleep until time fur dinner. They wouldn't hear of me leaving that night. I fully intended to go on the next day, but before I knowed it I been there a couple of days, and have got very well acquainted with that fambly.

Well, that was a house divided agin itself. Miss Lucy, she is awful favourable to all this night-rider business. She spunks up and her eyes sparkles whenever she thinks about that there tobaccer trust.

She would of like to been a night-rider herself.

But the old man, he says law and order is the main pint. What the country needs, he says, ain't burning down tobaccer warehouses, and shooting your neighbours, and licking them with switches, fur no wrong done never righted another wrong.

"But you were in the Ku Klux Klan yo'self," says Miss Lucy.

The old man says the Ku Kluxes was working fur a principle--the principle of keeping the white supremacy on top of the nigger race. Fur if you let 'em quit work and go around balloting and voting it won't do. It makes 'em biggity. And a biggity nigger is laying up trouble fur himself. Because sooner or later he will get to thinking he is as good as one of these here Angle-Saxtons you are always hearing so much talk about down South. And if the Angle-Saxtons was to stand fur that, purty soon they would be sociable equality. And next the hull dern country would be niggerized. Them there Angle-Saxtons, that come over from Ireland and Scotland and France and the Great British Islands and settled up the South jest simply couldn't afford to let that happen, he says, and so they Ku Kluxed the niggers to make 'em quit voting. It was THEIR job to MAKE law and order, he says, which they couldn't be with niggers getting the idea they had a right to govern. So they Ku Kluxed 'em like gentlemen. But these here night-riders, he says, is AGIN law and order--they can shoot up more law and order in one night than can be manu-factured agin in ten years. He was a very quiet, peaceable old man, Mr. Davis was, and Bud says he was so dern foolish about law and order he had to up and shoot a man, about fifteen years ago, who hearn him talking that-a-way and said he reminded him of a Boston school teacher.

But Miss Lucy and Bud, they tells me what all them night-ridings is fur. It seems this here to-baccer trust is jest as mean and low-down and un-principled as all the rest of them trusts. The farm-ers around there raised considerable tobaccer--more'n they did of anything else. The trust had shoved the price so low they couldn't hardly make a living. So they organized and said they would all hold their tobaccer fur a fair price. But some of the farmers wouldn't organize--said they had a right to do what they pleased with their own to-baccer. So the night-riders was formed to burn their barns and ruin their crops and whip 'em and shoot 'em and make 'em jine. And also to burn a few trust warehouses now and then, and show 'em this free American people, composed mainly out of the Angle-Saxton races, wasn't going to take no sass from anybody.